ABOUT THIS BOOK

The Contracted World includes representative poems from four of Peter Meinke's previous collections. In poems that show us what it is like to grow up in America, love, nature, cities, sports, war, and peace are filtered through the imagination and verbal skills of one of our brightest poets.

The new poems experiment with form, and address a life that is shrinking in specific ways: the poet is aging, the world is getting smaller, our post-9/11 freedoms are eroding, and our choices seem fewer and less attractive. Despite feelings of anger and loneliness, the narrator speaks to us in a personal, accessible, and often humorous voice.

REVIEWS

“Each poem is striking, and many are immediate favorites, all composed of vigor, sentiment, the high idealism and the self-humor that are particularly ours, and dished up in the twang and slang of American plainsong.”
--Publishers Weekly on The Night Train and the Golden Bird

“[Meinke’s poems] never omit the music of language and a real search for meaning; and while by turns playful, satirical and paradoxical, they never undercut their honesty by descending into nonsense.”
--Coldfront Magazine

“There is a little of the Ancient Mariner in the tenacity and urgency with which Peter Meinke addresses his readers. These poems get hold of us by the coat lapels and when they release us we are delighted, shaken, and considerably wiser.”
--Ted Kooser on Scars

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Left-Winged Sonnets
Brief Meditations on a Woodcut by Leonard Baskin  /3
The Graybeards  /5
Marine Forecast  /6
The Purity ofAbsolute Perfection  /7
The Death of Friends  /8
Turkish Coffee  /9
Elderly, She Paints Another Nude  /o1
The Director  / 1
91st Birthday  /12
Mystery   /13
Caterpillar Plague, 2000  /14
The Skiers  /15
Treasure Island  /i6
Maples and Orange Trees, 2003  /17
Rocking Horse Winner   /18
Butterfly Cage  /19
The Triumph of Desert Storm  /20
II. The Chemical Chain
The Contracted World  /23
P-town, '04  /25
What Wild-Eyed Murderer   /26
The DesertedVillage, 2002  /27
Inheritance  /29
The Spindled World  /30
The True UFO Story   /31
The Simplest Animals  /33
The Chemical Chain   /34
The Little Factory, 1863  /35
M. Hoffstetler's Last Class  /36
Blackberry Jam  /37
AmericanYouth   /38
Lilacs  /39
On Teaching Our Son to Tell Time  /40
The Wedding: February 26, 2000  /42
The Timaya Tree      /43
Epithalamion for Two Scientists  /44
The Bookshelf /45
Song from the Wrong Bay  /46
III. from The Night Train & the Golden Bird
The Night Train  /53
The Patient  /54
Morocco    /55
The Great Wall  /56
Gramma    /57
Bones in an African Cave  /58
Neuchitel Swans  /59
Cheerios  /60
Vegetables  /6i
Poem to Old Friends Who Have Never Met  /62
Sunday at the Apple Market  /63
The Anchor   /64
Angels Drink  /65
J Randall Randle  /66
The Golden Bird  /67
IV. from The Rat Poems   /69
V. from Trying to Surprise God
Trout   /77
Letter from Warsaw, 1979  /81
Happy Hour    /84
A Necessary Bucket  /85
Preacher, Said the General  /87
The Hunters: Southeast Africa  /89
Greta Garbo Poem #41  /91
To an Athlete Turned Poet  /92
Threnody   /93
Miss Arbuckle  /94
Recipe   /95
The Artist  /96
VI. from Night Watch on the Chesapeake
On the Bus in D.C., 1980  /99
The Pin   /ioi
Lordship Lane Station  /o02
Weeds   /I03
The Sheep   /1o4
A Dream of Third Base  /Io5
Sonfets for a Diabetic  /107
Fraxinus Nigra  /o09
Birchbark  /Ino
The Last Mountain Lion on Maple Crest Mountain  /I
Lines for the Reviewer  /112
Caitlin Rampant on a Field in Tuscany  /113
One Hundred Robins   /114
The Shells of Bermuda       /II5

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